Inspiration

APITRONICS

We help grower’s get real-time data about field conditions, so that they may irrigation more efficiently, manage disease risk, and understand...

SMART CITIZEN KIT

This website documents the work, ideas and experiments of artist and designer Dominic Wilcox

O WATCH

Learn Product Design and Coding

14 year old hacks a Twitter earthquake warning system

Sebastian Alegria is a 14 year from Chile who has hacked together a Twitter based regional earthquake alert system after seeing his country experience a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in 2010 (Largest quake ever was also recorded in Chile in 1960) and learning about the lives saved in Japan’s 2011 quake from the advanced early warning system operated there.

Sebastian began his project with the purchase of an off-the-shelf “P” wave (compression wave) QuakeAlarm detector for $75 which provides some added warning time in the case of an emergency through an audible alarm system. Sebastian pulled this detector apart and replaced the internal circuit with an Arduino board, connecting this newly outfitted device to his server and eventually online through the Twitter API. The result? Now the 77,000+ followers on his @AlarmaSismos account are given an extra 5-20 seconds to prepare themselves when the next big one hits.

Sebastian is currently working with local cell phone providers to try and hook his system up to SMS alerts which would result in up to a minute of advanced warning time. According to El Comercio others have already contacted him to spread the system in other parts of the country as the Chilean government's online warning system is not fully operational. When asked about the success of his current setup he answered ” I predicted five earthquakes since April. So far it has detected all the earthquakes that people feel (about 5 degrees Richter more or less) with five to 20 seconds in advance , depending on the distance from the hypocenter. You can improve time and efficiency by adding more sensors in Chile, which will happen”

It will be impressive to watch what is next for this 14 year old and the next generation of kids as they continue to experiment with open hardware and all of the new data and platforms available to them in the years to come.

Citizen Wireless Air Quality Monitoring

The folks at Brooklyn-based nonprofit HabitatMap make it their goal to spread awareness of the connection between the environment and human health. With AirBeam, a wireless air quality monitor now on Kickstarter, they’re hoping that a distributed network of “aircasters” will be the next big citizen science initiative.

There are a number of factors that impact air quality, and AirBeam focuses on one that is especially prevalent in cities: tiny particulates less than 30 microns in size — 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. These particles are created by diesel cars and trucks, coal-burning power plants, and forest fires, among other sources. Because they’re so small, they can get deep into our lungs and cause acute effects, like asthma attacks, as well as chronic effects like lung cancer.

AirBeam uses a light-scattering method to detect particles. Air is drawn into the device, and an LED shines a light on the sample. The amount of light that reflects off the particles, or scatters, indicates how polluted the air is — it’s like shining a flashlight through the smoke of a campfire. About once each second, AirBeam sends data via Bluetooth to a paired smartphone, which creates maps and graphs of the data before uploading it all to AirCasting.org for the world to see.

AirBeam shows pollution level with lights of different colors

AirBeam is Arduino-powered and entirely open-source, right down to the 3D-printed enclosures. It’s designed to be expandable, both through the addition of new sensors and by sharing AirBeam data with other websites and applications. That’s all in line with HabitatMap’s goal of empowering citizens. As lead developer Michael Heimbinder puts it, “We’re not here to tell you what to do with the technology.”

To spark the imagination, the AirBeam team is providing instructions to create DIY wearables and other accessories that use colored LEDs to represent AirBeam data in real time. Wandering a city with an AirBeam and a luminescent vest would certainly be an eye-catching way to draw attention to street-level air quality issues.

You can find all the Airbeam code and hardware specs on GitHub, and can download 3D printer files at Shapeways.

The camera consists of a USB webcam, a small thermal printer, shutter button, ethernet connection and Amazon’s API. When a picture is taken it’s sent off to the Turkers to create a written description of the image, which is then sent back to the camera and printed. According to Richardson’s post the total processing time takes between three to six minutes and the cost of the service runs about $1.25 for each image that is eventually outputted for the user in a polaroid type format.

As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections.

DisplayCabinet

DisplayCabinet is a prototype developed over the course of 24 hours by Ben Bashford, Dan Williams, and Tim Burrell-Saward for last years Internet of Things Hackathon. The project took a group of everyday inanimate objects (car keys, figurines, a toy bus, etc) merged them with a corresponding real-time data source and embedded them with RFID tags for identification. These objects were then combined with a pico projector so that when placed inside a circle of light projected onto the surface of the cabinet information relevant to the thing would be displayed around the objects.

“A figurine could show your Dad’s last known location based on the GPS data from his phone. A toy bus would show when and where the next buses are due to arrive. A small train gives pre-warning of any problems with the underground network.

As long as the data sets are available, the end user would be free to choose the information that they want to see. The system is designed to be completely unobtrusive when not in use, disappearing into the fabric of the building until it is required. Once activated, the information it conveys is concise and to the point, imparting just the required information and nothing more.” – Full Description from Tim

inFORM: Physical Digital Display

The Graphical User Interface, or GUI, has become so ubiquitous that it can be hard to remember a time when the only way to interact with computers was through arcane text commands. Pointing and clicking, swiping and tapping, icons and folders and windows and tabs — to most of us these interfaces are second nature. But the GUI’s days may be numbered. The inFORM project from MIT’s Tangible Media Groupmakes today’s most advanced touchscreen look as outdated as a DOS prompt.

inFORM is a 2.5-D Dynamic Shape Display: a surface that can dynamically alter its contours to represent information in the third dimension. At first glance it looks like a tiled tabletop, but each tile is actually the top of a square plastic rod that can be raised or lowered by actuators embedded beneath the table. Together these rods are like physical pixels that can give shape to digital information.

Above the surface is a Kinect camera that lets inFORM sense objects placed on the table and react to gesture commands. There’s also a projector to display graphics on top of the physical interface. And the table responds to physical inputs, so pressing down on one of the rod-pixels can alter its height — and the associated bit of data.

A display like this has obvious advantages for architects and designers, who could use it to directly interact with and manipulate their digital models; and for telepresence applications, in which a user at a remote location could use a camera to transmit gestures and interact with objects on the surface. But it’s hardly limited to niche uses: inFORM offers the chance to revolutionize the way we all interact with computers for everyday tasks, and really must be seen to be believed.

Though inFORM’s 30×30 display is ultra-low-res compared to a 1080p HD screen, it clearly demonstrates the possibilities of dynamic physical interfaces. The Tangible Media Group considers it just one of many steps on the road to their vision of “Radical Atoms” — a future in which we’ll be able to give physical form to all digital information and interact with it directly. Visit the group’s webpage to learn about other projects that experiment with telepresence, shape-changing interfaces, and more.

Cryoscope

Robb Godshaw an Engineer at Syyn Labs has created a haptic weather forecasting device called the Cryoscope that allows you to actually feel what tomorrow’s weather forecast will be like today.

Controlled by an Arduino board, the device has a range of 0-100 degrees Fahrenheit (neutral state of the cube is about 85°F(30°C)) and enables users to simply touch the aluminum cube casing that has been heated or cooled to the appropriate temperature forecast by a Peltier element, heat sink and cooling fan system.

The Cryoscope fetches weather data from the internet and users can update and change the forecast location through a web app. An RGB Led is also provided at the base of the device to visually gauge the current temperature of the unit.

DIY Bicycle Barometer

The bicycle barometer is a project by developer Richard Pope that takes daily weather forecast data and the status of the subway lines and outputs a graphic value (bike sign at one end and a tube sign at the other) telling him whether it is a good day for him to ride his bike into work that day.

In an interview with the blog Cycle Love, Richard describes his original inspiration behind the project “I’m not a total fair weather cyclist, but there are days I do, days I don’t. So I got thinking about the number of variables I weigh up in my head each morning and decided to build something to give my brain a helping hand. I’ve been playing about with Arduinos/Nanodes recently, and have a long standing interest in making better use of government data. So it seemed like the perfect project.”

Eventually Richard would like to expand the data inputs to include local traffic and pollution information.

You can view the device in action below or follow along with it’s development and code releases at @richardjpope.